Kryten

If you're going to start throwing around claims that nations are breaking international law, at least try to provide some proof? There's not even a motive to keep them, these are weapons neither country could actually use within current doctrine.

US chemical and biological weapons production was stopped on order of Nixon in the 70s, and the biological weapons destroyed at the same time. Russian BW and CW and American CW were removed from military readiness in the 90s and the last of both are both are being destroyed currently.

Narrowed to a couple of the most likely targets, which I've already given in this thread; any objects of that type older than those (both from 1998) would be expected to have been perturbed into solar orbits.

Based on further observations showing even smaller size than earlier thought and a stable light-curve (so roughly spherical, without flat panels to cause flashes), this is probably a small solid stage. Likeliest candidates (according to Jonathan McDowell) are the KM-V1 stage from Japan's Nozomi Mars probe and the Star-37FM from Lunar Prospector.

Orion is designed and intended for refurbishment and reuse.

It's just a different definition of what T:0 actually is; as first ignition rather than takeoff.

The statistics on orbiting reactors don't really back that up... most of them ended up shedding debris, including the only US example, in many cases quite energetically.

Helium-3 isn't terribly useful, and there's no major amount of it on the moon. You'd have to process enormous amounts of regolith to produce it, and a second-generation fusion reactor to feed it into. Even if you assume you have one of those, it's going to be easier to just produce it from tritium.

Wasn't the rotation of the minor moons already predicted to be chaotic?

Yes, it didn't change that in any way. You want many many more launches than that to justify a new engine production line, and presumably new design. There's no reason to assume this would even be any faster than BE-4, making the whole thing pointless.

How? You're talking maybe ten missions before Atlas V retirement, many of which have already been assigned to D-IVH.

Almost all Delta IVH launches are national security launches, so this is a complete non-starter.

Would be extremely difficult to get the T/W required. Even the most advanced hydrolox booster stages like the Delta 4 CCB and the in-dev H-3 first stage can't do much more than lift themselves, these boosters would have to take much of the core's weight as well.

Because all but one of the proposals were for kerolox, which were determined to not be economically doable because the cost of putting all the plumbing infrastructure back was underestimated. You might notice if you actually look that the shuttle SRBs are not being kept; much of the equipment to make the steel casings has been lost in the same way the F-1 and J-1 tooling has been lost, they're being replaced by a wound composite version with new propellant formulation. Also the SLS upper stages are using RL-10s that are already in production, Saturn V requires a J-1 restart.

Again with this nonsense. Building the Saturn architecture again would mean two new engines and productions lines for stages of two diameters, it would pretty have to employ more people than SLS; if what they wanted was 'more jobs', that's what they would do. They aren't doing it because it would be heinously expensive to set all this up, just like it was in the 60s, and this time NASA doesn't have a blank cheque.

Design isn't everything. This isn't KSP, you can't just slap parts together once you've researched them. Producing all the tooling needed to actually produce a rocket is the most expensive part of the development process by far. Besides, you're acting like the Saturn design is superior for no good reason. It's inherently more complex due to the staging, uses many more engines, and has shown poor reliability in the small number of launches it had (severe pogo issues and messing up Skylab).

This is all nonsense. For a start the 8 F-1 rocket was Saturn C-8, the design intended to be used for direct ascent lunar missions; it wasn't made because LOR made in unnecessary, not because of this nonsense about roofs. For another thing, you're acting as if the F-1 production equipment is in mothballs and we can just churn out more. It isn't, it was destroyed because it was no longer necessary and because those facilities were re-purposed for SSME production. The same is true for the J-1 engines you're pretending didn't exist, and the tooling for the 10m and 6.6m stages themselves. If we wanted to start this up again we would have to build all of those from scratch, and it would take enormous amounts of money.

Rocketdyne was formed in the 40s, there's not a lot of documentation from that era, and rocketry didn't get much publicity. I don't think you're going to get better than 'maybe'.

You want a less expensive tech review for something that would have to have a new diameter and new engines? That means you don't even have the same tooling, you'd have to start the entire manufacturing process from scratch, so you'd have to start all the certification from scratch. You'd also separately have to produce all of this tooling of course, which is incidentally the single largest cost for a new LV.

If you just put F-1s on the SLS core, it wouldn't go anywhere... you'd have to develop some very expensive upper stages and some additional extra engines. It would be much more expensive. There's no reason to redevelop Saturn V when the SLS design works just fine.

It was only LOM. If there were any funny issues, they'd be with 51 or 107.

An STS-13 was part of the initial shuttle manifest, it only didn't happen because the system for naming launches was changed after STS-9. There was Apollo 13, Explorer 13, et.c.

The plans NASA had before Kennedy put it on suicide mode were a gradual lunar exploration program; Ranger and Surveyor landers as RL, more capable Surveyor-based orbiter instead of the quickly put-together Lunar Orbiter missions we actually got; a series of mission called Prospector launched by smaller Saturn variants including rovers and robotic sample return, and ending at an Apollo landing somewhere in the mod-70s.

In that case that's basically what the constellation program was, complete with HLV the same diameter as Saturn. Obviously congress won't fund that, because they didn't.

422 billion is just a number pulled from somewhere unpleasant, and not far off the total NASA budget from foundation to now. Peak NASA budget was just under $6 billion in 1966, (roughly $43 billion today).